May 23, 2008

It's not often the girly side of my personality gets to mesh fully with my geeky side. Most of the geeky things I like aren't inherently girly and the girly things I like are almost NEVER geeky. So it was with great joy last night when my two halves were able to come together in a way I never thought possible. Grey's Anatomy and Star Wars.

It was the two-hour season finale of Grey's last night. I was expecting lots of drama, lots of surgery and lots of sex. What I was not expecting was to hear a one-minute twenty-second monologue about Han Solo. But that's exactly what I got.

Background for the dialogue I'm about to share with you is this; A young man named Andrew decided to jump into cement to impress a girl. Needless to say, that hardened on him like, well, carbonite and he was freaking out about it. Dr. Bailey the Chief Resident is trying to calm him down.

Andrew: I'm like Han Solo. In Star Wars? He was incased in carbonite?

(Later...)

Dr. Bailey: Andrew, you're going to make a lot of mistakes in your life, but mistakes, they're just pieces. Like this is the foolish piece but, you know, it's just a piece. You need to be proud of the whole picture. The whole picture defines you not just this one piece.

Andrew: I'm a loser, I'm a loser, I'm a loser, I'm a loser.

Dr. Bailey: Uh, Andrew! Andrew, hey! Hey! Listen to me. HAN SOLO IS NOT A LOSER. Han Solo got incased in carbonite and that was a big mess but that's not what he's remembered for. He's remembered as the guy who made the Kessel run in less than twelve parsecs and who braved the sub-zero temperatures of the ice planet Hoth in order to save someone he cared about from the big ugly Wompa. He's remembered as the guy who swooped down at the last minute, blasted Darth Vader out of the sky so that Luke could use the Force and...and destroy the damn Death Star! Ok? Princess Leia saved him from the carbonite and they fell in love and they saved the universe and had twin Jedi babies that went on to save the universe again. Right? Now that's the whole picture. The carbonite was just a piece. Ok?

(After several strange looks from the other doctors...)

Dr. Bailey: What? So I like science-fiction. Somebody got a problem with that?

Doctors Collectively: No. No. No. It's great. No. Not at all.

And there you have it folks. When she started talking I was thinking, ok, general knowledge I guess. But she kept going, and going, and going. By the time she got to the part about Han and Leia having twin Jedi babies I was in a geeky fever! That wasn't even in the films, that was in novelization! The only hint we had that Dr. Bailey was a geek was that she played oboe in her high school marching band and even then I would have never thought she'd be THIS serious. And here I thought the creators of Lost and Heroes were the only serious geeks in television. Thank you Grey's Anatomy for making my two halves feel like one.

(If you'd like to see the actual scene it's about 5:38 into this Youtube video of the finale.)

2
comments:

I don't usually watch Grey's Anatomy, but I was watching the finale with Freakgirl the other night, and had a good chuckle about this as well. And observed the same thing you did about the details she gave revealing that she was not only a fan of the movies, but the books as well.

Freakgirl made a good point, though, during one of the scenes that followed this one, where Izzy says to Bailey, "I'll try." At that point, to drive home her Star Wars geek cred, Bailey totally should have said to her, "Do or do not. There is no try." It was a totally missed opportunity!